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[/audioplayer]Like many, I’ve always been a bit baffled by the story of the rise of Nazism. The Germans I’ve met have appeared to be human beings like any other: in no signal way a different breed from my own countrymen.
Yet these are the great-grandchildren, grandchildren and children of a generation that was taken in by Adolf Hitler; or, worse, carried him forward; who supported (many of them) the Nazis; who knew or guessed what was happening to Jews, homosexuals and other minorities; who must either have turned a blind eye or positively encouraged what was happening.
How could they have? I’ve tried to insert myself into that era, imagine how it must have felt, picture a society in economic turmoil and gripped by personal insecurity, and think myself into a 1930s German frame of mind.

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